Oct. 10 was World Mental Health Day and a year ago, that date meant nothing to me, even though I knew I was dealing with struggles of my own.
I used to ignore it. I thought it was meaningless and later it came to haunt me.
Mental health was never a conversation in my household. My family and I didn’t have active conversations about our mental health and how to improve it.
I thought my parents were also stuck on that old-Mexican mentality, that those who publicly speak about their mental health problems are crazy or just looking for attention.
During these last two years of college, work and thoughts about my upcoming graduation became overwhelming, to the point where my mental health started to affect me physically. I never thought this was possible.
Before that, I saw my anxiety as something I needed to hide, because I was embarrassed and thought my family, my friends or society, in general, would not understand how I felt unstable.
I was living under the stigma.
This continued until one day, my body decided enough was enough and I had a terrible panic attack in the middle of the night. I hate being dramatic, but I seriously thought I was very sick or even dying. But, since the symptoms came out of nowhere, my dad was able to recognize it as a panic attack.
Little did I know, my dad knew the symptoms because he had previously fought his own battle against his mental issues.
I was shocked when he said he had severe depression when I was only 3 years old. That was the first time in my 20 years of life that I’ve ever heard my dad talk about it. I understood he was also living under the stigma and felt ashamed.
Thankfully, my dad, with the support of my mom and other family members, decided to get treatment and eventually helped him manage his illness.
That’s when I decided to accept and talk about how anxiety was seriously affecting me on a daily basis.
Ever since then, we started to talk about how to cope with stress and other situations that triggered our problems.
Later on, I saw my friends and people that I knew starting to have public conversations, tweets and posts about their own struggles. This gave me courage to speak about it myself.
Eventually, I told a few of my close friends and now I want to work toward being more open about it, in the hope of being part of a much needed conversation.
It’s sad seeing how many of us struggle with our mental health, but at the same time, I’m happy to see a lot of people engaging in dialogue about their own experiences and openly sharing their struggles.
We all need to work together to break the stigma of mental health and bring awareness to how normal it is to have those problems.
Judging is easy, especially with social media, where people feel entitled to voice their negative opinion, diminishing those with mental health problems.
It’s OK to voice your feelings and, most important, be honest with yourself and ask those you trust the most for help.
